A Century of Chess: Liège 1930
There may well be no more interesting player in chess history than Sultan Khan. Everybody else I’ve covered in this series comes from the same chess tradition — even the players from furthest afield, like Capablanca, Torre, or Levitsky, were ultimately part of a chess tradition rooted in Europe and in the rules that developed out of the Renaissance. But Khan’s chess background was completely different. He grew up in a poor Muslim family in a village in what is now Pakistan and learned a form of chess with a completely different evolution — with a very different rule for castling, entirely different openings, and different endgame rules. And then Khan’s breakthrough occurred in a way that was completely unfamiliar to Western sensibilities. He caught the eye of Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayet Khan, a Punjab potentate, who took him in as part of a coterie of chess players and schooled him in the Western game. In 1929, Sir Umar, on a trip to England, unveiled Khan, who quickly proved the sensation of the chess world. He won the 1929 British Championship to general astonishment and took shared fourth at Scarborough. Liege 1930, a mid-level international tournament in Belgium, was his real trial-by-fire, and Khan for a while looked like he was on track to putting together one of the greatest tournament successes of all time, winning his first six games and then securing a tough draw from Akiba Rubinstein.
His play, even from this distance, sort of looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before — probably the closest comparison is to Miles or Basman or some of the ultra-modern wild men who showed up towards the ‘70s. Another way to describe his style is that it looks awfully like computer chess. He very often split the board in the opening, playing on both flanks while relatively neglecting the center. He tended to ignore castling — maybe a holdover from his development in Indian chess — and to attack even with his king in the center. His play emphasized a great deal of fluidity, with pieces striking from long range and with attacks occurring all over the board.
And then just as suddenly as Khan had vaulted to the top of the cross table, he plummeted, losing his last four games and sinking to a modest result. I have no idea what happened. One newspaper report indicates that he might have been sick and Daniel King writes that he "completely lost his objectivity." Henry Golembek would write that "tournament play was a trial to him," and it may simply have been that he didn't have a particularly strong competitive streak.
Khan’s collapse redounded to Tartakower’s benefit. Tartakower had a way of slipping into the crowd at tournaments and a win here reminded the chess world that he really was a charter member of the elite. The tournament was a good showcase for his qualities — his offbeat openings, his ability to lead any game into wild thickets and and then to prove more cunning and resourceful than just about any opponent. Needing only a draw in his last-round game with Khan, he nonetheless played for a win and, with his victory, won the tournament by two points.
Tartakower also managed to put together one of the most unreliable tournament books ever out of Liege 1930, which reads like some kind of a just-so story of Marshall drinking heavily and confusing his tactics that way, of a desperate late-night struggle to produce a grandmaster draw. I’m not really sure I believe that Tartakower got the brilliant idea to open 1.e3 from a hotel waiter, but it is fun to read.
Sources: Daniel King has a book on Sultan Khan available here. Edward Winter writes about Khan here. I haven't been able to find Tartakower's tournament book, but excerpts of it are available on chessgames.com.
